FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Some information coming out of the antitrust lawsuit against Google:

"Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.

Why would Google want to do this? First, the generated results to the latter query are more likely to be shopping-oriented, triggering your subsequent behavior much like the candy display at a grocery store’s checkout. Second, that latter query will automatically generate the keyword ads placed on the search engine results page by stores like TJ Maxx, which pay Google every time you click on them. In short, it's a guaranteed way to line Google’s pockets."

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

web 2.0? web3? miss me with that, i'm waiting for Web 4.0 Workstation and am willing to put up with Web 95 in the meantime

The fact that 'fifteen-minute cities' is now a dirty word really puts into perspective all the time people spent agonising over whether 'defund the police' and similar slogans were too radical.

It's time to identify some confusing fall warblers.

In Nethack, playing on a Friday the 13th gives you a luck penalty. Playing when it's a new moon leads to a few interesting mechanical changes.

Friday after next is both October 13 *and* a new moon!

Are you gonna show off your Nethack skills on this spooooky rare day?

We hereby propose that the IAAF add a rule explicitly banning the use of ABH in competitions, and submit this article as justification.

New blog post — Would accelerated backhopping give you a competitive advantage in the 100m dash? Let's investigate!

https://moonbase.lgbt/blog/100m-accelerated-backhopping/

So here's a fun emergent feature on Mastodon 4.2:

- you can search your own posts even if you turn off other people searching you (use `in:library` as a term).
- you can post "DM"s that have no recipient, so only you can see them. These are searchable.

So you can use your Mastodon as a searchable note repository lol.

In a lot of ways, Facebook has a classic IBM problem

1. Won big early, and accumulated a war chest that let them absorb hits instead of adapting
2. Facilitated genocide

Possum is the regular noun and opossum is for when you want to show your respect for possums

ok so mozart may have been an extremely talented composer, but did he have a low-end 1992 roland rompler connected to a pc running open-source midi sequencer software? didn't think so.

when i rule the world, the tyranny of 🔁/🔂/❌ in music players will be abolished. “repeat” and “once” will be independent options, so you can listen to a single song in a list without it auto-playing the next one

GitHub's own tutorial for how you use OAuth with their API and get basic user info is out of date, but you know what's not out of date? that's right, my code to do that: https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/app-compatibility-db/commit/7d56a1d485739e87897c5a5cfececaddf42e5736

WATCH FOR ROLLING ROCKS IN ZERO A PRESSES THIS IS NOT A DRILL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFx7woWkZbc

Programmers fallacies about postcodes:
- A postcode covers a small geographic area
- A postcode is good enough to locate an end user for generating location suggestions
- A postcode will be in a single timezone
- A postcode only has a single state
- A postcode has no exclaves/enclaves

I would like you to meet 0872. Australia's largest postcode (I think), covers 3 states, has two cut outs (Warbuton and Alice Springs), and even still some mail outside of this area is routed via 0872

The owners of Neopets were trying to indoctrinate us in Scientology and NFTs but it backfired and instead what it taught us was "everyone is entitled to one free omelette per day" and that's why now all millennials are socialists

An excellent quote from a source I've long forgotten that I somehow just dug out of my archives:

Good yuri turns girls into lesbians. Great yuri turns boys into lesbians. 

in one of my circles of friends they do a thing where they add more than one member to pluralkit for people in their system and just make all but one of them private

and each one has a different expression in the profile picture

so while they talk they proxy their messages slightly differently as their tone changes, like an rpg talksprite. it owns

Just for giggles, I made my own live shader editor using #godotengine. It works great, however, I have no idea how to access the errors the shader compiler generates. So if something fails, I just show a horse. LOL. If anyone knows if accessing that info is possible, please let me kno. #shaders #screenshotsaturday

- If you care about the facts of the case, let's consider that **the robot was not actually stolen** and yet they were seemingly charged with "grand larceny," a felony. The robot drove away, of its own volition

Now that we've seen seen the legal mechanism used by police to compel a food delivery robot company to give them footage, we can now have a conversation about whether we as a society want ubiquitous, subpoenable cameras on wheels driving around our sidewalks at all times.